Tuesday, November 26, 2013

I'm thrilled to present the cover art I just received for LITTLE GREEN MEN AT THE MERCURY INN (Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan 2014)! It's by Andrew Arnold, who also did the interior illos.

LITTLE GREEN MEN AT THE MERCURY INN is a comedic middle grade story about three friends at a motel in
Cocoa Beach, Florida, and what happens when a manned space launch at
Kennedy Space Center is scrubbed due to the appearance of an
unidentified flying object over Cape Canaveral.

Today's T-shirt is from Zazzle.com and features a riff on the popular WWII slogan "Keep Calm and Carry On." I confess that I kind of prefer Churchill's formulation: "For each and for all, as for the Royal Navy, the watchword should be 'Carry on and Dread Nought.'"

But "Keep Calm and Ignore the Raptor" is pretty good, too.

The pictures were taken at Moody Gardens in Galveston last summer, at their Dinos Alive! exhibit. They basically had about a dozen animatronic dinosaurs on display in conjunction with a 3D movie - the premise of which seemed to be a bunch of folks getting lost in the past :-) (We didn't see the movie itself).

They didn't have a Velociraptor, but they did have an Ornithomimus, which qualifies as a "maniraptor," and hence "raptor." (Okay, I'm stretching it a little). Anyway, here are the pics:

Poor T.rex, his arms never get any respect. :-). But they're still bigger than Carnotaurus's...

Today's T-shirt is from zazzle.com and features pics from the Austin Nature and Science Center at Zilker Park. The place has a visitor's center and a great garden and pond, along with a Dino Pit and a Birds of Prey exhibit. Definitely worth a visit!

At the pond

All these guys were there in the Cretaceous except the heron (and the human)

Today we feature a fishy (heh) interlude: PIRANHAS RULE! Shirt is from zazzle.com.

Photos were taken at the Texas Memorial Museum, where it's about more than just dinosaurs. During the Mesozoic, central Texas was part of the coast of the Western Interior Seaway, and so was home to some rather large aquatic critters. Alas, piranhas don't seem to have been around back then, but one of my favorite fish with razor sharp teeth, Xiphactinus, was. Scroll down for pics!

In the spirit of Sinclair Oil (and Texas), these pics were taken at the Santa Rita No. 1 oil rig, on display at MLK and San Jacinto, on the University of Texas campus.

Sinclair Oil, of course, used to feature a "Brontosaurus" as its symbol (and back in the day, Sinclair was a sponsor of many paleo-digs out West.):

The Santa Rita No. 1 is the first oil well on University of Texas lands in west Texas (about halfway between Austin and El Paso). The oil well flowed from 1923 to 1990. This rig was moved to Austin in 1940.

William Sidney Porter lived in the house between 1893 and 1895. Every May, the site hosts the O. Henry Pun-Off. .Alas, it appears that he was not the first to refer to Austin as the "City of the Violet Crown" in print...

Shirt is from Zazzle.com and features a T.rex with a death ray laser coming out of its mouth, warning of the dangers of science. Or maybe, science fiction :-). Photos are by Sam Bond of Sam Bond Photography.

The Hartmann Prehistoric Garden at Zilker Park is one of my favorite spots in Austin. It features plants that either existed during or had ancestors with similar forms that existed during the Mesozoic and, thus, were contemporaneous with the dinosaurs.